Telephone call centers represent the front line for customer service, marketing operations, and debt collection for many businesses. Typical call centers receive or make hundreds of telephone calls per day with the aid of automated telephony equipment, such as a predictive dialer. A predictive dialer is a computerized system that automatically dials batches of telephone numbers for connection to agents assigned to sales or other campaigns. The predictive dialer monitors the answers to the calls it places, detecting how the calls it makes are answered. The predictive dialer discards unanswered calls, engaged numbers, disconnected lines, answers from fax machines, answering machines and similar automated services, and only connects calls answered by people to waiting agents. Thus, the predictive dialer frees agents from listening to unanswered or unsuccessful calls.
A predictive dialer can dramatically increase the time an agent spends on communication rather than waiting. Predictive dialing systems are commonly used by telemarketing organizations involved in B2C (business to consumer) calling as it allows their sales representatives to have much more customer contact time. Predictive dialing systems may also be used by market survey companies and debt collection services that need to contact and personally speak to a lot of people by telephone. More commonly predictive dialing systems are now being used as a quick and easy way to automate all sorts of calls which would otherwise be made manually by a call center, such as welcome calls for new customers, customer service call backs, appointment confirmations, or even for the automation of large numbers of ad hoc calls that might need to take place (such as by a taxi company, parcel delivery service, and the like).
Predictive dialers generally rely on the fact that if a person was to sit down and manually dial a large number of people, a large percentage of these calls will not result in contact with someone at the other end. Out of 1000 calls made, typically only about twenty five percent to thirty five percent of the calls made would actually connect to a live person. Of the rest, a large percentage (typically forty percent to sixty percent) won't be answered at all, about ten percent might be answered by answering machines, faxes, modems or other electronic devices, around five percent of the dialed numbers would be busy and the rest will result in network errors, or be identified as invalid numbers. For call centers that need to make large numbers of outbound calls, this represents a large problem. Typically in manual dialing environments, a given agent will spend around eighty percent of their time listening to the phone ring waiting to talk to someone, or dealing with invalid numbers or answering machines and only about twenty percent of their time actually doing what they are really there to do. By using a predictive dialer to filter out these unproductive calls and to spare the agent from having to wait for the phone to be answered each time, call centers can reverse the situation. Agents can spend on average around eighty percent of their time talking to customers and only about twenty percent of their time waiting for the next call, resulting in a three hundred percent increase in productivity.
The predicative dialer is commonly interfaced into Customer Relation Management (CRM) software, to both generate call lists and report call attempts. Unsuccessful calls are often analyzed to determine if the number called needs to be called back later or needs special treatment, such as a manual or autodialed call by an agent to listen to an answer machine message.
The predictive dialer exhibits predictive behavior when it has more call attempts (dials) outstanding than it has agents that are already available to handle calls. The predictive dialing happens when the predictive dialer dials ahead of the agents becoming available or when the predictive dialer matches a forecast number of available agents with a forecast number of available called parties. The matching and dialing ahead perspectives provide the large increases in dial rates and agent productivity.
As an example, if a system has one hundred agents associated with it, the predictive dialer will dial a number of calls based on a phone line to agent ratio of 1.5:1 or 2:1. This means that for each available agent, the system will dial the phone numbers of two potential customers. As these calls are made to the telephone network the dialer will monitor each call and determine what the outcome of the call was. From one hundred and fifty calls made, the system will immediately strip out any unproductive outcomes, such as busy calls (these are usually queued for automatic redial), calls that go unanswered (referred to as “no answers”) and invalid numbers. Some predictive dialers incorporate “answering machine detection”, which tries to determine if a live person or answering machine picked up the phone. This is one cause of the typical delays that a party answering a call may experience before being connected to an agent.
If not enough calls are made ahead; agents will sit idle, whereas if there are too many calls made and there are not enough agents to handle them, then the call is typically dropped.
An advanced predictive dialer determines and uses many operating characteristics that it learns during the calling campaign. The predictive dialer uses these statistics continually to make sophisticated predictions so as to minimize agent idle time while controlling occurrences of nuisance calls, which are answered calls without the immediate benefit of available agents. An advanced predictive dialer can readily maintain the ratio of nuisance calls to answered calls at less than a fraction of one percent while still dialing ahead. However, this level of performance may require a sufficiently large critical mass of agents. Conversely, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a high talk time percentage with a lower number of agents without increasing dropped calls
Predictive dialing systems use algorithms to control the ratio of calls to agents. Because a predictive dialer cannot know what proportion of its calls will connect until it has made them, it will alter its dialing rate depending on how many connections it manages to achieve. Occasionally the system will get more live parties on call attempts than there are agents available take those calls. Consequently, the dialer will disconnect or delay distribution of calls that cannot be distributed to an agent. This is known as a silent call or a nuisance call. The called party hears only silence when the predictive dialer does not at least play a recorded message. The experience for those who receive this type of predictive dialer call can be less than satisfactory.
There may be an appreciable period of non-response before a call is routed to a sales representative. This annoys people and also gives them a chance to abandon the call. If no sales representative is available for a successful call, it is often disconnected.
Predictive dialers integrate voice and data processing so businesses can maximize their productivity and efficiency when proactively calling their customer bases. Many predictive dialers are “closed”; that is, they operate as stand-alone systems. By contrast, “open” predictive dialers permit an entire enterprise to access the predictive application while also allowing access from the predictive dialer to any application in that enterprise. Open dialers have no limits to expansion and can function harmoniously with a user's computer and telephone systems.